Pretty sure Lucas himself personally didn't really care. What Lucasfilm's licencing department decided on the other hand, is another matter. It's surprising how often the fandom and even the genre press conflate the two.
Weirdly, according to Lucasfilm, Lucas was completely uncaring about the novels but fascinated by the video games. He's the guy who came up with the idea of THE FORCE UNLEASHED being about Vader's Secret Apprentice and sent hundreds of notes to the guys developing the Darth Maul game. Lucas was said to be a fairly hands-on creator whenever it was something he could see. The one exception book-wise was Shadows of the Empire which he sketched out himself.
Played it a lot on a Windows 3.1 machine (DOS based) and had issues when we upgraded to Windows 95. I much preferred the X-wing series games over the Rogue Squadron or Rebel Assault games. Much greater freedom of movement in the entire battle areas allowing for 3D tactics....or just going AFK and cruising off into the distance. Spent many, many, many hours playing both X-wing and TIE Fighter. Slightly less hours playing X-wing Alliance, but only because the missions were not quite as hard as the earlier games (or I had enough experience to make it so hard). I recall that one X-wing mission was legendarily difficult too the point where it made it into the Rogue Squadron novels as a training mission for pilots.
Tactics for completing the difficult X-Wing/Tie Fighter missions: Spoiler It's possible to learn from the experience of failed attempts where critical objects are located, such as which transports or containers contain items that need to retrieved. With this intel, you can focus on particular targets to inspect on retries. Often, their positions in the target list are not randomized, so you can count out which target each is supposed to be and beeline to each in turn, scan just them, and complete the mission without wasting time scanning all of the targets. It's also possible to accelerate disabling of objects by applying torpedoes (not enough to destroy, but enough to take the shields down) before applying ion shots to disable. This accelerates the disabling process. Used together, these tactics can shorten missions considerably, even though the first tactic especially is a more than a bit cheat-y. You can kinda rationalize it by imagining you had been part of a squadron instead of just one man against the whole enemy.
A sequel would have been interesting, but the Defender of an Empire expansion pretty much dealt with the ever growing rebel alliance, and the Battle of Endor, which Maarek Stele wasn't apart of. A sequel dealing with the aftermath of Endor would have been interesting, especially for people like Maarek who were apart of the Secret Order of the Emperor. From what I remember X-Wing Alliance left a few threads loose for a potential expansion pack, but never got one.
That's generally because the space flight sim genre bottomed out in 1999, following the flop of FreeSpace 2 (and Alliance didn't exactly set the world on fire, either). After that game bombed, pretty much every game in the genre that was in development was either heavily re-tooled or abandoned completely.
X-Wing was unforgivingly difficult. I beat the game a few times back in the '90s, but when I replay the game now I have a hard time remembering just how I did it. TIE Fighter, and Alliance were more forgiving in terms of difficulty. I played XvT but only in multiplayer, I rarely did any single player in that one. Never cared for the on rails experience of the Rebel Assault games. I do like the Rogue Squadron games though. I still prefer having more control over my ship though, managing power levels, shields, weapons, engines etc. Trying in vain to pump energy into my shields when I am in trouble is always an exhilarating experience.
I loved playing it the few times I could do so at a cybercafe, and I thought that it was a great game that was one of the best in its genre (my favorite one) along with the Wing Commander series and Starlancer. I haven't been able to play anything like it in years, because nobody at the bigger companies is making them anymore. All that I've been able to find (for the PlayStation3) is an independently made cheap game with (for me) great gameplay, but crappy graphics (the name escapes me for the moment) that I bought off off the PlayStation Store. I wish that whoever owns this Star Wars game would re-release it for the PlayStation 4 and the XBox One (the latter system of which I now own) as well as the Nintendo Switch, along with any of the Wing Commander games and Starlancer, plus the thee Colony Wars games. Or, whoever owns the franchises can come up with new games.
Loved X-Wing and Tie Fighter. I really feel like I've flown those ships. I was disappointed that portions of X-Wing didn't (eventually) match up with the later franchise. Star Wars Rebels depicted the B-Wing as being around since the early days of the Rebellion, whereas the game said the B-Wing was a completely new starfighter created by Admiral Akbar. Likewise, the A-Wing seemed to be a new ship in the game, yet was an old pre-Empire starfighter (or early Empire). Transmitting the Death Star plans to the Tantive IV was totally different in Rogue One than the game. OMG the Tie Defender was nearly impossible to fly. That took a lot of skill and patience to learn. Y-Wing tactics were awesome in the game. A single Y-Wing could disable a Star Destroyer (given enough time). Those bombers made sense in-game. Of course, the B-Wing was superior.
What is interesting about the B-wing story in Rebels and the old EU is that they don't entirely contradict each other. The B-wing in Rebels is a demonstration prototype developed on Shantipole by a Mon Calamari. It was taken to a secret Rebellion allied shipbuilding center to be developed. The EU version has the first production model B-wings coming out of the Shantipole Project, built by allied Verpine under Ackbar's instruction. Those stories more or less line up, since the production B-wing differs from the prototype in several ways. As for the A-wing, the old EU had them built by General Dodonna to counter TIE Fighters following the Battle of Yavin, but in X-wing, the Alliance already has A-wings, even at Yavin. So the old EU made up the R-22 to be a proto A-wing. The current canon runs with the R-22 being the Clone Wars built proto A-wing based on the Jedi starfighters, and the RZ-1 A-wings being the production version built at the end of the Clone Wars...but not for Imperial service...it seems to be a planetary defense interceptor or something. The major EU change seems to be that the X-wing was a design made by Incom for the Empire just after the Clone Wars, but was rejected in favor if the TIE Fighter...and at some point the Alliance got their hands on them and started building more. It still becomes the Alliances main frontline starfighter.
The stated intention while making ANH was that the rebels were using old, beat up and outdated ships because that's all they can get their hands on, and all the modern military grade fighters are Imperial designs. None of it was supposed to be at all new, so the idea that the likes of the Y-Wing, X-Wing & A-Wing were all Clone Wars leftovers is entirely consistent with that idea. That the B-Wing is the only new one kinda works too since again, Lucas's stated intent with the design of the Home One war room is that it actually look new and up to date, as if by this point the Alliance had finally come together and gotten some serious hardware, not just old Clone Wars surplus. Side note: LF had the A-Wing and B-Wing show up pre-ANH way before the video games.
A common tactic of mine when flying a Y-Wing was to disable Star Destroyers and then finish them off. Was challenging because once a Destroyer had shld dwn or hull dmg you would sometimes see TIE Advance fighters or Assault Gunboats hyper in. Sometimes Destroyers would try to hyper out once their shields were down. Couldn't target individual systems in X-Wing either, so the enhancements made in TIE Fighter, and X-Wing Alliance made it a bit easier.
Absolutely. Compared to the number of laser shots it took to finish off the hull of a starship after its shields had gone down, relatively few ion shots were needed simply to disable it. Using ion shots eliminated its ability to fire back at you and put a stop to its ability to escape, both as quickly as possible, which let you proceed to destroy it with relative safety and certainty. There were also reasons to use ion shots when available in fighter-to-fighter combat. In the first place, disabling your target first kept it from blowing up in your face. You could disable it and then kill it at your leisure from a safe distance. Also, you could use ion shots to assure that your guns were drained evenly, e.g. by rotating between ion and lasers evenly to drain the shields on your target. This was itself important for several reasons. When transferring shield energy to weapons, it would minimize waste, since any energy transferred into fully charged guns would be discarded. It also kept lasers more fully charged, since they would be used more sparingly. Best performance was achieved when using the charging/discharging options aggressively, so anything to maximize effective application of your energy was a definite advantage.